16 

.5 

T© 






HISTORY AND HISTORIANS 
IN AMERICA 

BEING THE PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS OF 

THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

DELIVERED 14TH February, 1929 



BY 

PROFESSOR T. F. TOUT, 
D.LiTT., LL.D., F.B.A. 



\ 

LONDON 
OFFICES OF THE SOCIETY , 
22 RUSSELL SQUARE W.C.i 
1929 



v6'Jlr 



y 






TRANSACTIONS 

OF THE 

ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 

Delivered 14 February, 1929 
By Professor T. F. Tout, D.Litt., LL.D., F.B.A. 

History and Historians in America 

When I last had the honour to address this Society, I 
was on the point of starting for a tour in America. During 
some eight months I traversed the United States from 
sea to sea, from Boston to Virginia and from New York 
to Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle, finishing up in 
Canada, which I crossed from Victoria and Vancouver 
to Quebec and Montreal. I visited many universities and 
colleges and lectured at some thirty of them. I inspected 
numerous libraries and had speech with many score of 
historians. There was much that was wonderful and 
strange to see and hear, but it was seldom that I could 
realise that it was a foreign country. If Quebec seemed a 
city of a France that had known no Revolution, and Santa 
Fe took one back to a small Spanish city with an intrusive 
Anglo-American element, the common tongue was a great 
link between the wanderer and his new friends, and he 
was never more bucked up than when he was assured 
by a leading newspaper of no mean city that, despite his 
strong English accent, his public orations were nearly 
always easily intelligible ! 



2 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

It was hard to be otherwise than at home. It was 
impossible to feel homesick when the extraordinary kind- 
ness and hospitality with which America greets her visitors 
was lavished on every side. In recounting this, one is 
but repeating what all other travellers have said. It is 
enough to put it on record, and that with the greatest 
conceivable emphasis. It was as impossible not to be at 
home, officially as well as personally. As President of 
this Society, I felt that I was visiting the brethren located 
in distant lands. It was only gradually that I got to 
realise that something between a fifth and a sixth of our 
constituency lies over the Atlantic. Out of our 800 fellows, 
over 100 are American and Canadian. Out of our 300 
subscribing and exchanging libraries, just one-third are 
libraries beyond the Atlantic. And there is no need to 
tell the members of this Society what important contribu- 
tions America has made to our Transactions and to the 
Camden Series. Of our most ambitious undertakings — such 
as the Bibliography of Modern History — is not Philadelphia 
responsible for the sixteenth century, though that has un- 
happily not yet seen the light ? Was not the published 
seventeenth-century volume finished in Chicago ? 

Reflecting on all these links stretching over the Atlantic, 
I felt that I could not do better than take as the subject 
of this, my valedictory address as President, History 
and Historians in America. It is a huge subject, and I 
must be content to limit myself to History in American 
Universities and Colleges and to the historical output of 
American historians. I must also not shrink from giving 
offence to my Canadian friends by speaking of America 
when I really mean the United States. But my visits 
to Canadian universities were brief. I saw the great 
universities of Eastern Canada on the verge of their vaca- 
tion, and I passed by the strenuous young universities 
of the West in the height of summer. I must therefore 
mainly speak of what I saw most of. Even then, I must 
leave out much that I should dearly love to say. 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 3 

I must not spend more time than I can help in emphasis- 
ing some essential differences between British academic 
methods and ideals and those of the United States — a 
difference the more important for us to realise since it 
results in the same words being used in the two countries 
in such different senses that confusing and misunderstanding 
are likely to arise to representatives of both nations, when 
they cross the Atlantic and take stock of the doings of 
the other side. Thus, to take one example : " college " 
to us means academically something smaller than a univer- 
sity — whether it be zn inchoate university that aspires 
to but has not yet attained university rank, or whether 
it be a smaller corporation within a university, some- 
times so self - sufficing and powerful that the university tends 
to become a loose federation of colleges, with little life 
or spirit of its own and little mission save the conferment 
of degrees. In America the college is the undergraduate 
department : the university is the combination of this 
with the various schools of professional and post-graduate 
work which loom so much larger in America than with us. 
American universities are governed autocratically by 
Presidents, responsible to a small body of lay trustees, 
who seldom meet and generally leave things to the Presi- 
dent. They are, therefore, like the Federal Government 
or the Railways, monarchical in constitution while their 
English counterparts are aristocratic, ruling through 
boards, councils and committees, whose endless meetings 
give the zealots for University business little time for the 
weightier matters of research, sometimes hardly enough for 
teaching. America has few honour schools, but a general 
pass course with an almost unlimited variety of options, 
extending over four years before the first degree of B.A. 
In this the utmost specialising possible is normally to 
take what is called a " major," that is a course in a single 
subject that extends over three years at least, but which 
is studied along with several other subjects. One result 
of this is that American examinations are more numerous, 



4 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

but less strenuous and less vitally important. A whole 
life is not determined, as it is still sometimes with us, 
on the accident of being fit in a particular examination 
week. 

In America real specialisation, in history as in every- 
thing else, only begins after the B.A. It is " post-graduate 
work " and it centres round the thesis, though there is 
also some examination work to be done before the goal is 
reached. A thesis of moderate originality leads to the 
M.A. ; a thesis of greater originality and extent may then 
be undertaken which leads to the Ph.D. And to take 
a Ph.D. is practically compulsory for all men and women 
who aspire to an academic career. In most cases you 
cannot become a professor until you have been stamped 
with this hall-mark. To facilitate the attainment of this 
rank and to train aspirants for it in historical method, there 
are, in every university where post-graduate work is done, 
seminars of great variety and complexity. The result 
is an enormous output of theses, which some universities 
— injudiciously I think — insist on being published in the 
form in which they were submitted to the examiners for 
the degree. Naturally they vary in merit, like English 
theses of the same sort : but these latter have the merit 
of being rarely set forth in print, and when they are printed, 
often years later, they have not seldom grown into some- 
thing solid and presentable. Fortunately, the increasing 
cost of publication is turning American authorities towards 
realising that it is better to issue a few good theses, than 
a larger number of immature ones. 

I must not tarry by further emphasising the differences 
between British and American universities. Yet it is 
important to remember that American schools seem, 
according to American testimony, less thorough and the 
results of their work less permanent, than is the case with 
the better sorts of British schools. The absence or rarity 
of compulsions, both at school and college, leads to a 
neglect of languages, and one of the weak points of the 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 5 

American historical student is that he is even often less 
familiar with the tongues in which his sources are written 
than his English counterpart. In making this statement 
please do not think that I hold any illusions as to the 
adequacy of the linguistic equipment of many English 
aspirants to historical fame ! But I am bound to confess 
that foreign languages, and especially Latin, are for many 
Americans a worse stumbling-block than even the lack of 
that broad basis of general historical knowledge that the 
honour school of almost any British university affords. 
Perhaps one grows more conservative as one gets older, but 
America certainly made me see that there was more to 
be said for honour schools and compulsory language subjects 
than in my hot youth I had ever dreamed was the case. It 
also taught me that the thesis, though a good servant, is 
a bad master, and that the cult of the repeated thesis is 
sometimes a mistake. If America had something like an 
English honour course for her M.A., and reserved her thesis 
for the Ph.D., the advantages of both systems might be 
retained and the disadvantages minimised. In adopting, 
rather too whole-heartedly, the German thesis system, the 
American reformers of a generation or two ago forgot that 
the German youth, when he went to the university, had had 
in his gymnasi'"'""' a good old-fashioned, well-rounded educa- 
tion, and ha^. passed an examination that might well be 
compared to the British or American pass degree. 

In making this criticism I am ignoring one fundamental 
point. The German student at a university aims at a 
specialised professional or academic career. It is quite 
different in America, where it is becoming the fashion 
for every boy and girl to go to college, though after college 
the boy will go to business and the girl will adorn Society, 
just as much as if he or she had never been to college at 
all. Mass production of educated men and women is 
not impossible, though not so easy as Mr. Ford finds 
the mass production of automobiles. Mass production 
of real scholars is impossible, as some of the overgrown 



6 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

American universities are beginning to realise. And what 
I am looking for now is historical scholars, not generally 
educated persons with a special interest in history. 

Thus the very universality of the American educational 
appeal has its nemesis. Things, however, are gradually 
righting themselves, and, more and more, certain univer- 
sities are beginning to stand out where the would-be 
historian can best be equipped for the race. There are 
the great universities of the East, strong in tradition and 
in endowment, with two or more centuries of history, and 
an absolute independence of state subsidy or control. 
There are the great state universities of the Middle West 
and the Pacific Slope, strong in their huge throngs of 
students, and in receipt of ample support from their respec- 
tive states. Their states, I must emphasise, for nowhere 
is education the business of the federal government ; it 
is the affair of the forty-eight sovereign commonwealths 
called states, which make up conjointly the federation 
called the United States. It follows that the ideals and 
methods of education vary with the social and economic 
conditions, the outlook, the history and origins of the 
individual state. The variety of the outlook breaks the 
monotony of state control. 

I am bound to say that the state governments — whose 
competence Americans themselves often strongly criticise 
— seem on the whole to have left the universities of their 
creation very much to themselves and that the political 
outlook does not seriously affect either academic freedom 
or studies. It is perhaps at its worst when it considers that 
professors should think twice before ploughing the son 
and daughter of a citizen of the state who pays his taxes 
regularly and expects his children to be turned out of 
college with the proper educational label. I don't think 
we need take seriously the Mayor of Chicago's crusade 
against textbooks with an anti-patriotic bias, inspired 
by the malignant and immortal " King George " who, 
after spending his youth in denying the Americans their 



Presidential Address f 

freedom, is devoting his declining years to feasting American 
professors that they may traduce their own country and 
glorify its enemies. Such tendencies may prejudicially 
affect school books, but they have little weight in univer- 
sity teaching. I am told — I know not whether rightly 
— that some intelligent American publishers publish dif- 
ferent editions of school histories for northern and southern 
states. But university teaching in America is fairly free, 
and suffers, if at all, from the general tendency of the 
country towards uniformity and conformity of judg- 
ment. The modern historians of the " Colonial period " 
are admirably impartial. You find much more " Ameri- 
can bias " in an old-fashioned Whig historian in England, 
like Sir George Trevelyan, than you get from the admirably 
trained and learned historians who do excellent work 
on the investigation, in their own land, of all phases of the 
American Revolution. 

What sort of history do the American universities 
study, and what contributions do they make to historical 
knowledge ? The answer to this question is not easy to 
give in a short compass. Naturally and properly their 
first concern is with their own national history, and no 
one can blame them for that. Equally properly, they 
are still more particularly concerned with the history of 
their own state or the group of states to which their com- 
monwealth belongs. Beyond this, they look to Europe as 
a main source of their civilisation. This in the East gener- 
ally means to Europe in general but to England in par- 
ticular. To the French Canadian it means the ancien 
regime in France. To the Scandinavian and Teutonic 
Middle West it may often signify Norway or Sweden or 
Germany. To the Pacific Slope it means Spain and, after 
Spain, Spanish America. Moreover, in California special 
attention is paid to the history of what we should call 
Eastern Asia, notably China and Japan, whose influence 
on the Pacific lands and the Pacific Coast cannot be 
neglected. In the same way California has very serious 



8 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

schools of Spanish American and still more of Mexican 
history, just as in New England and its western offshoots, 
historical origins suggest the meticulous examination of the 
Elizabethan and Stewart England which sent forth its first 
colonists over the seas, and, beyond that, an appeal to the 
Middle Ages out of which the later Britain grew. The zest 
for quite recent history has gripped American as strongly 
as it has seized hold of British historians, and the wonderful 
collection of documents and records which President Hoover 
has presented to his own Stanford University enables, I can 
well believe, the origins and results of the Great War to 
be studied with at least as much particularity amidst the 
woods and bays of Palo Alto as in any of the European 
capitals. Altogether the hive of history is humming every- 
where with busy workers. The honey which they produce, 
though appealing differently to different tastes, is, as a 
rule, sound, pure and good. We must be prepared for 
a great variety of output ; we must recognise that the 
work of the prentice learning his trade is different from 
that of the master. But the masters are there, and if 
they are few, they are few in any other land. But there 
are not many English workers on history who have not 
had reason to salute some American master whose work 
is to them an inspiration, and there are fewer still who 
have not pleasant memories of friendly talks and deep 
discussions with American comrades in their pursuit. 

Mediaeval History does not bulk largest among 
the fields to which American historians have devoted 
their attention. But we have for many years looked to 
the United States for a steady and increasing output of 
sound and original contributions to mediaeval history and 
especially to the medieval history of England. If I speak 
of these at greater length than I have been able to devote 
to other aspects of history, you must forgive me. But the 
cobbler who makes his shoes of mediaeval leather is naturally 
inclined to think that there is nothing like his own par- 
ticular sort of leather to make solid and lasting footwear, 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 

and I am proud to be able to speak strongly both as to the 
quantity and the quality of mediaeval research in America. 
It was not until I had spent many months in America that 
I fully realised the appalling difficulties amidst which the 
American medisevalist worked. The atmosphere of America, 
with its optimistic outlook to the future, and its profound 
conviction that the present and future are greater and 
better than the past, is not always very sympathetic to the 
investigation of remote antiquity. If this can be overcome, 
there is more fundamental trouble. The unpublished 
material on which the best work is necessarily based is 
nearly all three thousand miles away, even from the univer- 
sities and colleges in or near the Atlantic seaboard. The 
mediaevalist from California,^ or Washington, has a week's 
weary and costly journey over another three thousand miles 
by train, the mediaevalist from Colorado has a good two 
thousand miles by train before he can reach the places 
where steamers carry him another three thousand miles over 
the ocean. Such a scholar is lucky to be able to make the 
journey in a fortnight and for that he has to incur expenses 
that make a deep hole into the budget of even the most 
opulent of American professors. And when he arrives on 
this side, he has to support himself in costly cities like 
London or Paris, where prices are not, in my experience, 
very much lower than in the cities of his own land. And 
it is quite an illusion to think that American historians 
derive from their profession much higher remuneration than 
we on this side enjoy, while the swarm of research students 
who are only slowly mounting the ladder have to make 
sacrifices to their science which many of us would shrink 
from, sacrifices which would be impossible but for the 
liberality — which this country might well emulate — which 
" sabbatical years " and travelling bursaries and fellowships 
do something to minimise. Moreover, he has to work as 

1 I have carefully avoided mentioning names in this very rough survey, 
but I cannot forbear recording the grave loss to our science in the sudden 
death of Professor Paetow, of Berkeley, one of the strongest of westera 
mediae valists. 



10 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

a rule through the hottest and most uncomfortable season 
of the year when his British brethren are recuperating 
from their sessional labours among the mountains or on 
the seashores. Of course these difficulties are not confined 
to mediaevalists. Indeed the modernist is in some ways 
worse off, for his material is infinitely bulkier, more scattered, 
and less well calendared and arranged. Nevertheless, they 
come — men and women students of all periods and of all 
aspects of history. They come here year by year in their 
scores, and no one of us of the Old World can work through 
a summer in the Public Record Office or the British Museum 
without adding largely and profitably to his American 
acquaintance. Some we may find who, inspired by a spirit of 
adventure and love of seeing new men and cities, have come 
rather earlier than they need. But most know their business 
and know what they are out to seek. One cannot speak with 
too great enthusiasm of the real hardships and sacrifices 
which they willingly incur in their zeal to advance their 
science. There are few among us in comparison who make 
their journey in the opposite direction. But those of us 
who do so meet with a welcome and a hospitality which 
may well make us feel how cold relatively has been our 
reception of these transatlantic pilgrims to the shrines of 
historical material. 

I have hinted at the facilities with which most American 
institutions do their best to lighten the difhculties of the 
eastward-bound historian. Two other conditions must also 
here be stressed which make possible the devotion of 
American students and scholars to the history of the Old 
World and to the history of those countries in particular 
from which most of the American stock originally came. 
These are the excellence and accessibility of American 
libraries and the gradual accumulation in the American 
continent of great masses of manuscript material for Euro- 
pean, and especially for British, history. Among the 
things for which I envied the American scholar most was 
the admirable organisation of the great University Libraries 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS II 

of the New World. We on this side may have more precious 
rarities, but they, on the other side, know better than we 
do how to order a Ubrary so that the research student can 
have the greatest facihties for his work. I know of no 
university Hbrary which does more to help forward research 
than the great library at Harvard, where every professor 
has his study and the humbler research student has his 
little cubicle, where the earnest worker can gather around 
himself the indispensable tools that he has in constant use, 
while all have access to the well-arranged stacks, so disposed 
that books dealing with particular subjects are grouped 
together with a maximum degree of accessibility. And at 
New Haven I was privileged to see plans for an even more 
magnificent and convenient library building for Yale 
University which, I feel confident, are now rapidly being 
carried out in stone with the faith and enthusiasm that 
characterises all the great American seats of learning. Nor 
are these standing by themselves. In the newest of Western 
and Middle Western universities the library is fostered with 
a zeal, and at an expense, which put to shame the newer 
university libraries of England. As far as printed books 
go, the greater American libraries are exceedingly well 
equipped, and if some gaps must still be there, there is 
always the wonderful Library of Congress at Washington 
and the huge Public Library of New York, itself a synthesis 
of a whole group of collections, and the impressive Library 
of Columbia University. 

In these great collections of books the American student 
can generally find what printed volumes he is in search of. 
The deficiency is rather in manuscripts and in older and 
rarer volumes, which are everywhere extremely difficult to 
procure. But these deficiencies are being rapidly supplied, 
and there are many public authorities and many millionaires 
who are doing their best to fill up the gaps. It would 
require years of study and travel to speak with authority 
upon these libraries, and, as I wish to speak on first-hand 
knowledge, I will confine my remarks to the one great 



12 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

American private library at which I was privileged to work 
for some six weeks last summer. This is the Henry E. 
Huntington Library at San Marino, near Passadena in 
California, only a few miles from Los Angeles, the greatest 
of the cities of the Pacific Coast. Its history is, however, 
sufficiently typical to illustrate many other similar cases, 
though few, I imagine, have acquired so great a mass of 
manuscripts or so many rarities and curiosities. And I speak 
of it with the more alacrity since I found on my return to 
England last September a fierce controversy was raging 
in the newspapers in which zealots for British scholar- 
ships bitterly complained of the wholesale abstraction of our 
best manuscripts and unique early editions that they might 
be locked up in an inaccessible and remote spot in the 
Pacific Coast, where they are likely to remain permanently 
lost to scholarship. 

With the lamentation that so much good material for 
history is passing out of this country, I can express a hearty 
sympathy. I believe that most scholars would welcome 
some sort of limitation on the export of our choicest docu- 
ments and curiosities, such has long prevailed in Italy. But 
so long as the trade of exporting manuscripts and biblio- 
graphical curiosities is a legal one, we cannot blame too 
severely the ancient houses, struggling against hard times, 
for making what they can of possessions which have a 
greater appeal to the scholar than to most of those who 
own such treasures. Indeed, I would blame them more 
severely for the indifference which in too many cases they 
have shown to their ancient documents, indifference to the 
extent of not knowing what treasures they possess. Even 
more reprehensible is the curious way in which many of 
them have locked up their possessions and absolutely 
denied access to them, even to the best qualified of scholars. 
Thus many of the most historical family archives have never 
been brought before the eyes of the Historical Manuscripts 
Commission, a body that has done an immensity of good 
work and might, I venture to think, do even better work were 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS I3 

the eminent historians of modern periods sitting upon 
it atforced by a commissioner or two who has done good 
original work on mediaeval historical materials. Unluckily 
" war economies " still only allow it a ludicrously inadequate 
income, so that it has accumulated manuscript calendars 
of various collections which it can only publish with exceed- 
ing slowness. Considering the amount of our post-war 
budgets, it seems an unworthy economy to hold up this good 
work for the sake of saving a few hundred pounds a year. 

It is not enough, however, that the pre-war resources 
of the Commission should be restored. Post-war conditions 
clamour for further extension of its powers. It is surely a 
permissible argument that in any really civilised state such a 
responsible body as the Historical Manuscripts Commission 
ought to have a legal right to examine and calendar docu- 
ments of historical value, and, if necessary, to prevent their 
exportation from the country. Unless scholarship is to lose 
sight permanently of much priceless historical material, we 
must prevent unrestricted free trade in the sources of our 
history. Apart from the danger of dispersion, there is still 
before us the fact that certain owners of historical manu- 
scripts sternly refuse scholars access to them. Though many 
owners of historical material leave nothing to be desired in 
the way they give access to their treasures — and their number, 
I am glad to say, is much on the increase — there are cases 
where American scholars have been refused permission even 
to see them, and that not only from individuals who have 
some excuse for regarding them as their own private 
property, but from official custodians of public or quasi- 
public records. It is still, I fear, the case that the registers 
of some bishops remain inaccessible, or only accessible by the 
payment of fees beyond the means of the average scholar. 
Such churlishness is, I venture to think, at least as repre- 
hensible as their sale outright. Fortunately, as regards 
bishops' registers, the number of peccant dioceses is now 
quite small, and most of them are reasonably easy of access. 

If the prohibition of the export of historical manuscripts 



14 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETV 

and the compulsory calendaring of the manuscripts of 
recalcitrant owners are both outside practical politics, the 
least we can do is to make some efforts to keep track of 
manuscripts which do chmge owners or leave the country. 
An admirable beginning has been made in this direction 
by the Institute of Historical Research in London, though 
it has found real difficulties in accomplishing its task. It 
is vexing enough to find that manuscripts which have been 
calendared by the Historical Manuscripts Commission, have, 
like the Hastings manuscripts, been moved from Ashby- 
de-la-Zouch to California before the Commission's calendar 
had been put on the market. It is still more irritating 
when an uncalendared collection also takes its flight over 
the Atlantic. The task of recording for history's sake 
what there is in any of these collections can only be 
fully and perfectly accomplished, when it has been made 
legally necessary to record the sale of such manuscripts, 
whether within or without the country. 

However these things may ultimately turn out, I 
think that we have no right to blame the wealthy Americans 
who, under expert guidance, purchase such documents as 
their owners are willing to sell. Some of the letters I read on 
my return last September suggested that the plutocratic 
purchaser bought his documents in order to keep them under 
lock and key and gloat over them for his own personal 
gratification. There may be such cases, but I should like 
to say with emphasis that the Huntington Library is not 
one of them. Its creator, a Californian railway magnate, 
spent huge sums in purchasing not only books and manu- 
scripts, but a wonderful collection of eighteenth-century 
paintings and gave them a home in his own great house 
at San Marino, on the last of the foothills where the Cali- 
fornian uplands slope down to the plain of Los Angeles. 
He was not himself a scholar or a connoisseur ; but he 
followed the best advice that he could get. His art pur- 
chases were extraordinarily happy and built up a most 
remarkable and coherent collection of masterpieces. As a 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS I5 

collector of books and manuscripts he was, I imagine, at 
first mainly wishful to bring together unique specimens, 
rare early editions, treasures of illumination and enrichment. 
But before he died, he handed over his treasures to a carefully 
selected body of trustees and empowered them to use the 
funds with which he endowed them to buy any books or 
pictures that might illustrate the history of civilisation. 
A wider commission could not be imagined, and the trustees 
are men who can be trusted to make a wise use of the dis- 
cretion left to them. They have made up their minds not 
to be content with a museum of curiosities, but to combine 
with this a working library for scholars. It was on their 
invitation that I spent five or six weeks in one of the most 
beautiful places in the world, where the heats of summer 
were never so excessive as to prevent a northerner, like 
myself, working at full power. My mission was to report 
on their mediaeval manuscripts and especially their historical 
manuscripts. My time was all too short for a compre- 
hensive survey, but I had opportunities for taking general 
stock of the collection and that task was made more stim- 
ulating by working side by side with various American 
scholars who were similarly attacking other sides of the 
library. It will take years before the collection can be 
completely catalogued, classified and arranged. Gaps will 
have to be filled up ; a considerable modern library of 
reference books will have to be purchased. But I should 
like to say with absolute emphasis that the library is already 
accessible to all properly accredited scholars, and that any- 
one who goes there will receive a most cordial welcome, and 
every help to pursue any line of study that he may wish to 
take up. 

To the British medisevalist the library presents some 
extraordinary attractions and suggests some severe limit- 
ations. There is an enormous mass of charters, public and 
private, ranging from the twelfth century to the end of the 
Middle Ages. The basis of the manuscript store is found 
in several big English collections which Mr. Huntington 



l6 TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL HISTORICAL SOCIETY 

bought. The most complete is a wonderful assemblage of 
Battle Abbey manuscripts, the completest series that I 
struck. It came, I think, from the Phillips Library, and a 
rough catalogue of them was printed some eighty years 
ago, when, before Sir Thomas Phillips bought them, they 
were in vain offered for sale, I was told, to the British 
Museum, at a price which was then small and now seems 
ludicrous. They were not very accessible at Cheltenham, 
except to plutocrats who could pay a guinea a day for the 
privilege of working in the library. They are now open to 
the world, and afford material, not only for the history of 
a great Benedictine abbey, but for the economic and social 
history of many manors and hundreds in East Sussex and 
West Kent. It is no doubt a pity that they are so far away 
from the region where they were made : and I can sym- 
pathise with a Sussex archaeologist being a little sore at 
their removal to the other side of the globe. But there 
they are, and there they are accessible, and there is some- 
thing to rejoice that the American ecclesiologist or economic 
historian has a mine in which he has only to dig to find real 
treasures. Unluckily, the only Calif ornian University 
where at present the study of mediaeval history is strongly 
and ably pursued is at Berkeley, some four to five hundred 
miles away. But there are two big universities hard by at 
Los Angeles, within only a few miles, and as any American 
university is liable to sudden and vigorous expansion, it is 
not too much to hope that in time there may be a local 
school of mediaeval history to reveal the treasures of Battle 
Abbey to the world. And a few hundred miles doesn't seem 
a big distance in America ! 

The other mediaeval collections at the Huntington 
Library are less complete, but in some ways more attractive. 
There is, for instance, what are now called the Huntingdon 
Manuscripts, till recently the property of the late Mr. 
Rawdon Hastings of Ashby-de-la-Zouch. I spent a good 
deal of time in copying some of these, only to find when I 
got home that the Historical Manuscripts Commission has 



I 



PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS I7 

just published the first of four volumes in which they will be 
described. But, luckily for me, some of the calendaring is 
so much abbreviated that a few characteristic " mentions " 
which I had noted are not recorded in the published volume. 
Besides this, there is the great Stowe Collection, whose 
" Grenville evidences " contains an immense assortment of 
mediaeval documents, public and private. There are 
numerous important items bought at the various Phillips 
sales. There is a considerable proportion of the Ellesmere 
Manuscripts, including the remarkable Ellesmere Manu- 
script of the Canterbury Tales, which the Manchester 
University Press published in facsimile more than twenty 
years ago. There is a rich store of Middle English Manu- 
scripts, which should attract literary historians. To all 
sorts of scholars alike the Huntington Library Management 
gives every facility for purchasing photographs and roto- 
graphs. But I must not go on any longer, and would not 
have tarried so long but that I feel that there are at present 
few scholars who have first-hand knowledge of it sufficient 
either to explain wherein its richness lies or to defend it 
from unwarrantable attacks, such as those to which I have 
already referred. It is some poor return for the kindness 
and hospitality I received at San Marino to do what in me 
lies to expound the true state of things about the Hun- 
tington Library. 



Printed in Great Britain by 

Butler & Tanner Ltd. 

Frome and London 



v- 



